the nominal three (to William of Ockham)

Minimalists such as Flavin, Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt explored abstraction through reductive, repeated and monochromatic forms in the early 1960s. Flavin’s distinctive medium consisted of white or coloured fluorescent tubes and the light and shadows they create. In this, perhaps his most iconic work, he used the minimum number of ordinary light fixtures necessary to establish a series. The title pays tribute to William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century philosopher who developed the philosophical principle known as “Ockham’s Razor”: “it is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.”